Carol Rosenberg

Carol Rosenberg has been filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act since she returned to the United States in the mid 1990s after years of reporting in the Middle East.

First for The Miami Herald and later for The New York Times, she has leveraged FOIA to unearth government records and contracts , FBI files, military investigations and historic photographs. Sometimes she has sued. Sometimes she has cajoled. Often, she has filed appeals for returns that took months, even years, and came too late or too redacted.

“It is an important tool in a reporter’s toolbox that can sometimes yield information otherwise hidden from public view,” Rosenberg says. “It can be the tool of last resort. But it has served me well.”

Her filings have produced solid information and meaningful results.

In 2018, a FOIA request returned the employment application of a U.S. immigration court judge who had secretly sought the job while serving as an Air Force judge in a Guantanamo case. He had failed to disclose to the parties that he was seeking a post-military job from the same entity that had a role in prosecuting the case, the Justice Department.

Defense lawyers for the prisoner were stunned by what they saw as a conflict of interest, which government lawyers had not disclosed to them. The lawyers appended the file and her article to an ongoing case, resulting in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacating two years of that judge’s rulings. That FOIA discovery reverberated throughout the Guantanamo court and in a military court-martial case. Now; military judges and their staff are bound to disclose their pursuits of other government jobs.

One favorite – and surprising – return occurred during the coronavirus pandemic. While working from home, she opened a zip file from the National Archives and two-decade-old photos of prisoners in orange jumpsuits arriving at Guantanamo spilled out onto her computer screen. She was there that day, January 11, 2002, and had seen military photographers documenting the mission from a far, as a pool reporter.

But the photos were hidden away until a series of FOIA requests and follow up phone calls  released them. The work then began on The Secret Pentagon Photos of the First Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, an annotated study that fronted a Sunday edition of The New York Times. The project gave the public a new opportunity to explore an episode of U.S. history whose consequences are still felt today.